PALMA il GIOVANE (JACOPO NEGRETTI). — Painter, born in Venice in 1544, died there in 1628.
Son of the painter Antonio P. and great-nephew of Giacomo P. VECCHIAIA (v.), he learned the art from his father and was a pupil of Tiziano, whose last masterpiece, the Pietà (Accademia di Venezia), he completed. As a young man he went to Urbino and from there to Rome, where he stayed for eight years, studying Michelangelo. Upon returning to Venice, he defined his pictorial style by blending the teachings of the great Venetian artists of the sixteenth century, especially Tintoretto, and creating an easy, mechanical manner directed toward superficial effects and the monotonous repetition of conventional formulas. He thus became the
chief person responsible for the decline of Venetian painting in that period.
One of his earliest works is the decoration of the sacristy of S. Giacomo dell'Orto; among the best is the decoration of the oratory of the Crociferi (to which he devoted twelve years), where there are passages full of realistic spontaneity and narrative simplicity, along with several excellent portraits. In his later works, a rhetorical pursuit of effects would prevail, achieved through a dark chiaroscuro that only very rarely kindles into vivid, ringing tones. He produced many works for the Palazzo Ducale: from the Assault on Constantinople to the great ceiling with Venice crowned by Victory (Hall of the Great Council), to the cold and conventional allegorical representations of the League of Cambrai and the Homage of the Venetian cities to the Dominante, and to the superficial Last Judgment in the Scrutiny Hall. His works are exceedingly numerous in Venetian churches and throughout the Veneto, in Sansepolcro, etc.